Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
80 days. Approaching the port, foreign sailors sighted the two-story,
stucco dwellings that formed the city's skyline, punctuated occasionally
by church spires, stretching out for a mile and a quarter along the banks.
Black and mulatto washerwomen, the servants and slaves of the finer
porteño
households, daily lined the shores, scrubbing articles of clothing
on the rocks. The first vista of Buenos Aires was not imposing.
Loading and unloading the ships appeared as unimpressive as the
skyline. Shallow waters prevented the larger wooden sailing vessels
from anchoring closer than 3
1
/
2
miles from shore. Sailors had to trans-
fer passengers and freight to and from sailing lighters, which carried
them across the shoals. Passengers and freight were then transferred
from sailing lighters to horse-drawn carts, which had been pulled a
third of a mile into the water. Each cart had wooden wheels nearly 13
feet high to keep the cart bed off the water. As described by travelers,
the whole port presented a scene of bedlam: “The sand-flat, and water
beyond it, was covered with carts . . . conveying goods to and from
the ships in the roads, with Gauchos riding about with lassos, made of
strips of hide plaited, tied to their horses' girths, to help carts requiring
an extra tug” (Videl 1820, 61-62).
Buenos Aires in this era was atypical in that it did not have a mon-
ocultural export economy that depended on the export of just one or
two staple products. Cattle hides dominated trade throughout the entire
period, but they lost their primacy to raw wool as the principal export
at the close of the 1850s. Great Britain still took great portions of tallow,
horsehides, and bones. The United States, the German states, and France
became good customers for Argentine raw wools and salted hides. France
and North America imported most of the region's sheepskins, while all of
the salted beef produced in the Río de la Plata found markets in Cuba
and Brazil, where slaveholders bought Argentine beef to feed the grow-
ing slave populations.
English merchant houses predominated but by no means excluded
French, German, and American traders who resided in the Río de la
Plata. Their advantage over the Argentine Creoles lay in their affiliation
to markets abroad and their access to superior capital for the worldwide
movement of goods. Unlike the Spanish merchants, such as Marcó
del Pont a generation before, these foreigners lacked the commercial
contact of kinfolk throughout the region and therefore depended on a
secondary level of native
porteño
merchants to handle the merchandis-
ing in the backlands.
Estancia
production became an important invest-
ment outlet for native capital. Many families of colonial commercial
origin put their funds into cattle raising. Similarly, native merchants
